Love Conquers All

Yes, it’s this thing called LOVE…This thing that creates a big buzz every time this month of February is in and Valentine’s Day is fast approaching!

LOVE is defined and compared in many ways, some say that love is blind, love is a mystery, love is complicated, love is not a feeling but an ability, love is a poison that can kill a person, etc. I do not have my own definition of what love is but I have this one chapter from the Bible, a letter from Paul, that for me best defines what love truly is.

* 1 Corinthians 13

The Way of Love

1If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2And if I haveprophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

4Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

8Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. 9For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. 11When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. 12For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

13So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

*From Bible.com

Love conquers all…yes, it does! Let me share you an excerpt from what Col. Mike Asperin said last Sunday, February 8, 2009, when he was invited to be an inspirational speaker for our Mission Month in our church. It goes something like this, as I remember it:

“One day I asked my wife for some money, she told me to get it from her wallet…so I reached for her wallet and when I opened it I was surprised to see my picture inside it along with some pictures of our kids…I am very much flattered to see my picture in my wife’s wallet and thought that I must have inspired her…and then I told my wife, “I took the P1,000 bill from your wallet…” (a nod is my wife’s answer) then I can’t help but ask, “I saw my picture inside your wallet, why is it there?”…I was fishing for a compliment, then my wife answered, “Every time that I have a big problem that I need to face I open my wallet, look at your picture and say to myself, ‘What problem could be bigger than this?'” 😀 [laughter broke the silence inside our church]

Perfect example that love indeed conquers all, I say that without love Col. Asperin’s wife would have left him a long time ago because of all the troubles he had caused to himself and his family, a little background – Col. Asperin was one of the soldiers involved in the first coup d’ etat here in the Philippines, he was imprisoned for a long time, he was a notorious soldier in Mindanao, he even was a Muslim – all of these before he became a Born Again Christian and now a very active preacher of the book The Purpose Driven Life to if not all but most of the members of the Armed Forces of the Philippines including the Philippine National Police. Which explains why that was the remark of his wife when he asked about the picture. 😀

Love conquers all…in my own married life this is true. We’re not the perfect couple, we had our share of mistakes during the course of more than 10 years that we’re together. But still, here we are, together and intact! Ask any person who knows us from our highschool days and they would say the same thing, that me and my husband are total opposites and that they would be wondering why we are still together. How did that happen? Cheesy as it may seem but there is only one answer to all the riddles of this married life – LOVE.

“So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”